September 2011

September 18, 2011

The Social Network, a fictionalized account of how the website Facebook was founded and then turned into a social and financial sensation, primarily poses the question whether its founder and creator was a nice person. But it actually raises some much weirder questions. The film has two large problems: its creators’ inability to depict a plausible narrative of the creation of something like a website, and its creators’ inability to depict a plausible version of success that involves more than buying a nice house with a pool, throwing wild parties, and getting your name in the paper. The plot seems to be—oddly—Mark Zuckerberg becomes a Hollywood superstar, very much like the filmmakers themselves; there is almost nothing in the story to mark his success as being of a different kind than theirs. Everyone knows that the moral of the film is that Mark Zuckerberg is a bad guy who has been living a bad life, but if the story has the fictional Zuckerberg living the life of those who imagined him, what is it that’s supposed to be bad about it?

This is not the story of how Mark Zuckerberg struggled and worked to overcome obstacles that arose as he tried hard to accomplish a difficult goal; this is not Apollo 13, in which people were called to go above and beyond, working extra shifts for no recognition greater than a gift of a new tie from their wives. This is the story of how Mark Zuckerberg ignored every obstacle that put itself in its path: and all of those obstacles arose from the will of others’ opposing themselves to him (usually by telling him there’s something he should pay closer attention to). Actually, there are no real obstacles. He and his friends tell a few friends about “The Facebook,” and they tell a few friends, and so on and so on and so on. On campus after campus, within a couple of weeks of students’ getting access to the site, it is the biggest thing since pitchers of beer. The coding goes smoothly, and everything just falls into place. There are no technical challenges that require hard work and thinking even from a programming genius. There are no unforeseen hardware failures, no power outages that make prearranged deadlines impossible. There is nothing Mark Zuckerberg got wrong—except the rule that one should never stomp on the little people on his way up the ladder.

The only problem Zuckerberg has is that he doesn’t know an algorithm to create an absolute ranking of a large group of competitors on the basis of a limited number of real competitions between selected pairs of them. He has to ask his friend Eduardo Saverin for that information. We do see him in an Operating Systems class, in which he solves a complex calculation, involving addressing theory, on the spur of the moment (Zuckerberg’s actual Harvard OS professor has written up some of his reminiscences, with reference to The Social Network, here and here). But there is no sense, in the film, that memorizing theory and doing quick mental math is not enough to create a successful computer application, much less a distributed application. Admittedly, a focus on technical issues would be boring. But the filmmakers suggest that Zuckerberg’s accomplishment lay in finding an opportunity and making sure he was the only one who profited from it: the near equivalent of climbing onto a speeding train and pushing those already riding it over the side.

It was not necessary, moreover, to hinge the film on the bizarre personality (as portrayed in the film) of Sean Parker. (He is described in the film as the founder of Napster, though according to Wikipedia his real involvement is questionable.[1]) Parker, as depicted, and presumably as can be shown through publicly available documentation, is a flake. He has a history, not only of being unable to work with colleagues, but of fallouts with police, over cocaine use and underage girls. He appears to be paranoid and (in the words of Saverin in the film) delusional—which is not so surprising if the allegations about cocaine are true. He does have contacts in the business world that Zuckerberg and Saverin lack. His intuition that Facebook could have an even bigger impact—on something—than Napster had, on music sales, turned out to be right. Saverin’s apparent feeling that what they had was just an ordinary dot-com business success turned out to be wrong. Yet the narrative is set up as Zuckerberg’s choice—between remaining on the East Coast, finishing college, and being ordinary—and breaking into the big time in California, turning himself into a superstar. Saverin remains committed to the first of those choices, while Parker tempts Zuckerberg towards the second one.

The problem is that the film does not successfully distinguish Parker’s way of life from his business and technical ability. There is a relentless focus on the way having lots of money gives men the wherewithal to form private all-male clubs and party, to stay out all night drinking and taking drugs and getting hot women to take off their clothes and dance with one another. At Harvard, this is the province of the final clubs, like the Porcellian, to which Zuckerberg’s nemeses the Winklevoss twins belong. Mundane fraternities like AEP[2] only have lame-looking mixers, and people like Mark Zuckerberg—because of their aggressively ambitious personalities, the film suggests—will never be accepted into those people’s clubs. In California, on the contrary, a smart guy with lots of ambition has the chance to become Sean Parker. You can write code in your rented house and party with college girls at the same time.[3] You can get hot women who wouldn’t have looked at you twice before you were rich.[4] There is no real sense of irony in the film’s idea, expressed by the Beatles’ song that plays over the film’s final shot, that Mark Zuckerberg is now “one of the beautiful people.”

And Parker’s personality is certainly typical California. The drugs, the partying, the contempt for the East Coast as old and stodgy, the idea that nothing of any importance is going on anyplace else. The identification of expertise with knowing the right people and being willing to play them, of creativity and intelligence with business sense and aggression. Parker is Zuckerberg’s Paul Simon to Saverin’s Woody Allen (with Mark Zuckerberg, then, as Annie Hall, if rather more successful than she will ever be). And he behaves, and talks, in a manner more frequently associated with Simon’s and Allen’s generation (or with Sorkin’s) than with that of today’s young people. There is no apparent irony in this, either. The idea seems to be that California tech executives and Hollywood stars are the same—and better than everybody else—and, not least, just because they are free enough and rich enough to party. At least the filmmakers don’t seem to have cared to do some research and find out whether they and their subjects are different.

Which raises the question: Are the filmmakers capable of understanding success as anything deeper than money, fame, and personality, as anything more important than the ability to gain access to a kind of secret society where drugs and free love are the rule? Is joining a men’s club (a gentlemen’s club in the real meaning of the phrase) what “making it” means? Are rich people better than the rest of us, really, only because they know how to party?[5] It’s as strange as if “the music of the night,” promised by the phantom of the opera in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical of that name, were only what could be heard from a ladies’ room stall at Studio 54.

(For more, here is an interesting story about Mark Zuckerberg and the origins of Facebook, by Zuckerberg’s Harvard classmate Rebecca Davis O’Brien.)

[1] It’s interesting that the MP3 format used by Napster is, technically, a very poor format. Its great advantage is its simplicity. It is easy to program to. I’ve wondered whether this is an example of technical lock-in as a result of nontechnical path dependence, something that is far from rare (Sony Betamax is widely regarded as superior to VHS), but in this case arose because the only broadly available application for downloadable audio files was created not only by amateurs, but by student amateurs.

[2] At Columbia, for what it’s worth, AEP renamed itself as TEP when it decided to become coed and admit women, not just as “little sisters.” Does Harvard have any coeducational fraternities?

[3] Was the racist garbage about how perfect Asian women are for Jewish men really necessary? And while the male characters were cast to resemble more or less plausible college students (as opposed to, say, characters on The Practice), the women looked like Victoria Secret models more than like Boston undergraduates. There are plenty of good-looking women in Harvard Yard. Couldn’t a little effort have been made to find out how they dress?

And what was up with the BU girlfriend, Erica’s, beret? Did dating Zuckerberg upset her so much she decided to become Orthodox?

[4] Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue, as usual, goes by too quickly, but especially in the first scene, he definitely nails a certain sort of man and the way he talks to women. Believe me, they are not all geniuses.

[5] Do they think poor people don’t party?

P.S.: It's been pointed out to me--by my husband, who has a Facebook account, which he signed up for initially for distributing baby pictures--that it's ironic I would be writing a post about The Social Network when I don't use Facebook myself (except when he shows me his account, so I can see my relatives' pictures, or updates from female acquaintances of his who cook much fancier than I do).

September 13, 2011

A post by Henry Farrell over at Crooked Timber threatened to turn into a debate over the facts concerning layoffs and unemployment (see comments by kidneystones and subsequent discussion), but didn’t seem like an appropriate place to have this discussion.

The question arose, what does a layoff mean? There were people (I don’t know who they are, how old they are, what they do for a living, or even what country they live in, as they were using the silly sort of pseudonym) who seemed to believe some kind of implausible things—as best I could determine (they weren’t all entirely clear), they seemed to include the beliefs that being laid off always marks the end of a worker’s or professional’s career, that a person’s skills deteriorate to the zero point almost immediately after a layoff, that new skills can only be acquired in a formal degree program and at the beginning of a career.

Now, it’s true that if you are an experienced auto designer or engineer or manufacturing worker at one of Detroit’s Big Three auto manufacturers, and you lost your job in the recent unpleasantness, it is unlikely you will be able to get a similar job. It isn’t impossible, because probably the Big Three will need to hire a small number of senior people over the next several years, and so will the foreign automakers who have plants in the United States, and your skills and personality and so on may well be a good match, but there will be so few of these jobs, especially if you don’t want to relocate, that this is not likely. But the United States’ automobile industry has been stagnant for decades and is not likely to rejuvenate itself. There are many other industries that taken together employ more people than the Big Three. Firms in those industries have layoffs for all sorts of reasons: poor cash flow that requires expenses to be reduced, poor numbers generally that require quick action to restore confidence from the stock market, decisions to cancel products or get out of attempted lines of business that can most readily be taken by letting go all the people who worked on them, decisions to outsource that are accomplished in the same way.

The first company I worked for had layoffs almost every year for more than a decade, starting before I worked there and continuing after I voluntarily left. The second-to-last company I worked at, before leaving to have a baby, laid off everyone involved with the product line I worked on, in a process taking nearly a year. I survived the first round of layoffs, presumably because I was fairly new and my pay was lower than most of my colleagues’, then was let go three months later. A small number of people were kept on for another six months, with a retention bonus if they stayed until their scheduled termination date. The industry press for the next couple of years indicated that the layoffs there were continuing. The first of those companies hung on for almost a decade after I left (that is, approximately fifteen years after the first layoffs), to be bought out by another big corporation. The second is still around, having shifted out of a market in which it was in last place, with sales declining toward zero, and into a market where it had some hope of grabbing a toehold and the kind of market share that would permit it to survive (long enough, probably, to bought out by one of the big firms). These were small-to-medium sized corporations, employing from several hundred people, in the latter case, to well over ten thousand (down to a few thousand by the end), in the former.

In between, there was at least one downturn (the one beginning, for the high tech industry, in early 2001) that lasted long enough that there were people out of work longer than they could afford to wait. And that was before the mortgage crisis, so lots of people would probably not be able to wait as long as they might have before, if there were to be another downturn in this industry. (BTW, I knew at the time that people were getting bid out of their price range on deals they felt they couldn’t turn down, but five percent or less down? On a first house?) But layoffs are a fairly normal thing for tech professionals, as they are for many other industries. They aren’t desirable, and hopefully they don’t occur too many times in a person’s career, but they don’t necessarily signal the end of the world. Layoffs are how firms shed workers they no longer need, releasing them, in a fairly inefficient way, back into the workforce. Layoffs are also what happens when firms close locations, end lines of business, or fold altogether. And in high tech, these things happen with some frequency.

One of the commenters at the Crooked Timber thread said s/he hoped s/he would know things were getting bad so s/he could get out before a layoff occurred. But what if things were getting bad only a year after s/he had started a new job? What if s/he had real responsibilities on a project and would face the question, “Why aren’t you staying to see things through?” S/he says s/he would not take unemployment insurance (though it sounds like s/he might not understand the difference between UI and welfare), no matter what, because taking government money is a sign of shiftlessness. S/he sounds like someone who would see excessive job-hopping as equally a sign of shiftlessness, so I’m not sure s/he would really be able to follow through if such a thing happened to him or her.

There may well be inefficiencies in the labor market, but given that there is in fact a labor market, and given the fairly widely understood facts about unemployment and hiring, expecting there to be zero unemployment in everybody’s history is pretty unrealistic.

Things are probably different in an economy or a market that is dominated by one, or maybe two or three, 800-pound gorillas, in every subset of the market—as opposed to being divided into several sub-markets, each with a handful of players. In a one-firm economy, unlike with what we have now, rather than laying people off, they can be moved around—but leaving that one firm would be the equivalent of leaving the field entirely. In that case, being laid off is less like belonging to a chess club and losing one game, and more like being expelled once and for all from a large building with only one entrance. Of course, there are other differences, and there is a reason that innovation comes from smaller firms more often than from the giant conglomerates.

Feel free to add your experience or opinions in comments, about high tech or any other industry.

September 10, 2011

I was in New York City the week before the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. There were some police on the streets, of course, but there always are police, and nobody thought anything of it. The crowd at Arthur Ashe Stadium “evacuated” the stands, and the players returned to the safety of their locker rooms, for quite some time, but that was only because of the heavy rain, and the danger of lightning, and nobody thought anything of it. Those days are over. New York has changed, and the way tourists relate to the city when they visit it has changed.

D.G. Myers, now blogging for Commentary, has a long list of 9/11 novels. Emily Rooney broadcast a shorter one including nonfiction books from BostonSteve Almond (video and a link to the text version of the list). Most of them are ordinary “social novels,” about people who lived in New York in 2001 or are otherwise affected, in one way or another, by the events of that day. Adam Kirsch, in the newish Jewish magazine The Tablet, has a different list of novels. He argues, along with some of Myers’s Twitter followers, that The Plot against America should be considered among them, though Myers begs to differ.

I think Kirsch has a point. What is most memorable about The Plot against America is, in part, the fear of the adults, and the way that a horrible political event seemed to license behavior that, under normal conditions, those adults would barely consider acceptable even from their children: the panic that event inspired. And the fascist elements of the alternate society Roth imagines—which so scare the adult characters in the book—are, arguably, only an extension of the armed soldiers that appeared in airports and on city streets, and of the vigilance (and lessened concern for civil liberties) that seemed threatened by the emphasis on security implied by the words “after 9/11, everything is different.” The novel just isn’t a plausible one in a world where 9/11 has not taken place.

Similarly, I would argue that Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day is a 9/11 novel, at least in one chapter (the one that begins on page 149): in which the boy adventurers of the zeppelin Inconvenience fail to prevent a dangerous monster-enfolding meteorite from being brought into an unnamed city. The details are different, but the reader’s knowledge of what’s being described will derive from the news stories about that day.

“This city, even on the best of days, had always been known for its background rumble of anxiety. Anyone who wittingly dwelt here gambled daily that whatever was to happen would proceed slowly enough to allow at least one consultation with somebody—that ‘there would always be time,’ as citizens liked to put it. But that quarterless nightfall, events were moving too fast even to take in, forget about examine, or analyze, or in fact do much of anything but run from, and hope you could avoid getting killed. That’s about as closely as anybody was thinking it through—everyone in town, most inconveniently at the same time, suffering that Panic fear. . . .

“On the night in question, Hunter Penhallow had been on his way out of town but, feeling something at his back, had turned to witness the tragedy unfolding along the horizon, stricken into remembering a nightmare too ancient to be his alone, eyeballs ashine with mercilessly sharp images in flame tones, so overbright that his orbits and cheekbones gathered some of the fiery excess.”

Pynchon’s vision here is a kind of anti-9/11: what could have been and maybe should have been, in a Manhattan of the imagination, a nightmare worst case, differing in idiosyncratic but important particulars from reality. And if there's a sense in which Against the Day might be a 9/11 novel, Chronic City, by Jonathan Lethem, surely is. In Lethem’s novel, all of downtown is enveloped by a mysterious dark fog, which simply appeared one day and never left; and later, one of the characters becomes unreachable after his apartment building collapses, with no warning, leaving behind it only a deep pit and a police cordon. Both Lethem and Pynchon foreground the emotionality and weirdness of living under a threat that is nearly incomprehensible, not only in its vastness and in the unforeseenness of what motivated it, but in its vagueness, though neither of them says anything that might unambiguously refer to a real historical event.